“It’s a long story,” I said quickly, before I lost my nerve, “but basically, there was this accident with the timeline and the geis was doubled. And then it started growing or morphing or something, and I was going out of my mind until I inherited the Pythia’s power. It gave me a reprieve, but you ended up half crazy and, well, in here.” I held out the black box. “The Consul ordered you locked up so you wouldn’t, um, run amok or…or anything.”

“Basically?” Mircea repeated dryly.

“Well, yeah, pretty much. But I think I know why the counterspell won’t work. Because the geis was put on two of you—one in the current timeline and one in the past. But since only one of you is present whenever we try the spell, it doesn’t think you’re all there. So to speak.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s like with the Graeae,” I explained impatiently. “I accidentally set them loose and we’ve been trying to trap them again ever since. Only it seems they register as one person for the sake of any magic used on them, and if one of the three is missing, the spell won’t work. So they just make sure that they are never all together anymore. Then we can cast the spell all day and nothing will happen.”

“Let me see if I understand,” Mircea said, pulling on another of Ming-de’s little gifts. “You believe the geis views the two of me on whom it was placed as one person.”

“Because you are.”

“But because I hold the spell in two separate timelines, if it encounters only one of me, it does not view me as a complete person, and therefore will not work?”

“Exactly. We all have to be present at the same time—two of you and one of me, because I had it placed on me only once, but you had it done twice. Once by the mage who initiated the spell and once by me. At least, I hope I have that figured right, because if we need another me this is really going to get complicated.”

“Going to?” Pritkin muttered.

“That would be why, in Paris, your dress did not harm me,” Mircea mused, ignoring him. “Because, linked as we were by the geis, it saw us as one. And, of course, it would not harm its owner.”

“Well, two-thirds of its owner, but yeah, that’s it.”

“I am in there, am I?” Mircea slipped onyx cuff links into the French cuffs on his shirt and eyed the box skeptically.

“We can let you out,” I said dubiously, “but I don’t think…that is, I’m not sure how you’ll react. Marlowe said he couldn’t control you, there at the end…”

“Can we get on with this?” Pritkin demanded.

Mircea ignored him, but he gave me back a frown. “Has it not occurred to you that the mage has deceived you? Perhaps in an attempt to get into this very room, past security, to assassinate me in a vulnerable position?”

“Do mages frequently do that?” I asked, surprised.

“A few dark ones have tried. After what happened to the last one, I have had a reprieve for some years.” He glanced at Pritkin. “But perhaps the lesson has been forgotten, and must be taught again.”

Pritkin leapt up from his chair. “If I intended to harm you, I have had more than enough time already!”

Mircea bared his teeth in an expression that in no way resembled a smile. “Feel free to try.”

I refrained from throwing something, but it was close. I’d known bringing Pritkin was a bad idea, but after the debacle with Nick, I hadn’t dared to trust anyone else. Not to mention that he was the only one who knew the spell. It had to be him, and it had to be now.

“I honestly don’t know how much time you have left,” I told Mircea quietly. “If we do nothing, the spell will run its course and you’ll die anyway.”

“The spell was never designed to kill,” he reproved. “Not in its wildest permutation.”

“No, but it can drive someone mad! And then the Consul will do the killing for you.”

Mircea paused, his eyes sliding to the snare. He regarded it for a long moment, expressionless. I guess it would be a little weird—okay, a lot weird—to imagine yourself trapped in there when you were standing right beside it. “The Senate has many experts at its disposal. Surely they can find a solution.”

“That’s already been tried. Do you think the Consul would have had you imprisoned if there was an alternative?”

“But would not this counterspell remove the geis from me, as well as from your Mircea? And thereby change time?”

“No, we don’t think so.” It was one of the things I’d asked Pritkin before we left. “It’s being cast on the three of us, to break the bond we all share. But it can’t affect anyone who isn’t here, which includes the Cassie of this time. So your link with her should remain and, uh, run its course.”

“Leading to a great deal of trouble.”

“I’m afraid so. But there’s no other choice—not if you want the present timeline to continue.”

“The one in which you are Pythia.” I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. Mircea had known since the battle at Dante’s that his crazy gamble had paid off. He looked thoughtful for a moment, but then his eyes slid to Pritkin and his expression hardened. “I know you think you are acting for the best, dulceata?, but you do not know what our enemies are—”

Pritkin swore and, before I could stop him, said something in a low, guttural language that sounded awfully familiar. Before I could blink, before he even finished speaking, Mircea had pressed him against the wall, a fist in his shirt and murder in his eyes. “Mircea, no!” I grabbed his free arm. “I thought we were going to wait until he agreed!” I said to Pritkin, furious.

“He would never have agreed,” he spat, “and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter? He could kill you!” Laying a spell on a master vamp without his permission was considered so stupid that there wasn’t even a law against it. There didn’t need to be—most who tried it didn’t survive long enough for a trial.

“You don’t understand. The geis—”

“What about it?”

Pritkin looked like he’d swallowed a handful of nails. “Can’t you feel it? The spell didn’t work. The geis is still there!”

Chapter 29

“That’s impossible! You said—”

“I said your theory seemed plausible if the spell had not morphed into something new. Obviously it has. In the hundred years since you placed it on the vampire, it has had more than enough time to grow, to change, to become a new spell. As a result, the counterspell won’t work. Because the spell it was designed to offset no longer exists!”

“You’re telling me we went through all that for nothing? That we’ll just die anyway?”

“Not for nothing. In the process, we discovered—” He glanced at Mircea and hesitated. “Much of interest.”

And, yeah, that might be true, but knowing what was really behind the war wouldn’t do me much good if I wasn’t alive to fight it. “That doesn’t help!”

“I told you all along that I doubted the counterspell would work,” he informed me, in the tone that made me want to hit him even more than usual.

I was about to return a scathing reply, when I suddenly remembered. He had said that, but he’d said something else, too. Something that I’d forgotten because I’d been so fixated on the Codex. There was another way to break the geis, one that Mircea had woven into the spell himself.

My heart sped up as I ran the idea over in my head. All three components of the geis were here now: me and both Mirceas. The counterspell didn’t work, but that was because the original spell had changed form, not because my theory had been wrong. But Pritkin had said that the fail-safe was part of the geis and that it would morph along with it. So the fail-safe should still work.

“There might be an alternative,” I said slowly.

“What alternative?” Pritkin asked, his eyes narrowing.

I looked at Mircea. “Do you remember, when you had the original spell cast, you had the mage put an escape clause in place?”

“A fail-safe, yes. I was advised to do so by everyone with whom I spoke. It is a common precaution, as the duthracht geis is famous for—” Mircea stopped, understanding flooding his eyes, followed immediately by a stubborn glint. “Dulceata?—” he began warningly.

“It didn’t work with Tomas,” I said, speaking quickly before he made up his mind, “because he was a substitute, but for only one of you. And just like with the counterspell, the fail-safe will only work if there’s two of you, uh, participating.”

“Cassie—”

“You must be out of your mind!” Pritkin broke in. “If it doesn’t succeed, you could end up tied to him forever!”

“That won’t happen.”

“You don’t know that! There is no telling what might occur with a spell left to its own devices for that long!” Mircea hadn’t spoken, hadn’t moved. But suddenly the security detail was back. “I suppose it only requires the right master for you to knuckle under—is that it?” Pritkin sneered as they started manhandling him from the room. “You were brought up as a vampire’s little lapdog—I should have thought you’d prefer not to die one as well!”

The door slammed shut, although I could still hear him ranting as they towed him down the hall. “You can’t hurt him. He has to go back with me.”

“Their orders are merely to detain him,” Mircea said, looking at me narrowly. “I thought you would prefer to discuss this in private.”

“Yes. Well.” I stopped and mentally pushed Pritkin’s accusations away. I had to concentrate if I was going to get this right. If I was going to make Mircea understand. “If I’ve figured this right, and I’m pretty sure I have because we’ve tried everything else, then…it has to be all of us. The fail-safe was never an independent entity but was tied to the geis itself. So when the geis changed, the fail-safe changed right along with it. That’s why built-in safety measures are used with the duthracht. Because even if it does go haywire, they will still counter it.”